Sea Witch (6 page)

selkie, or you are not. You live in the sea, or you die on land. I am selkie,

like my mother.”

So she had touched a nerve. She poked at it again, the way children

on shore thrust sticks at jellyfish to watch them twitch. “But your father

was human.”

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“I do not speak of my father.”

“Tell me about your mother, then.”

“She drowned. In a fisherman’s net.” The cry of the gulls carried

upward on the wind. Dylan turned his head and held Margred’s gaze.

“Because she ventured too close to shore.”

“Another warning?” Margred asked softly. “Have a care, Dylan. I do

not take cautions well. Or instruction either.”

“Something is happening,” Dylan argued. “Something affecting the

balance of power. Conn fears it. We all feel it. There’s a disturbance in

the demon realm.”

Margred shivered. She did not want to think there was more to her

recent restlessness than frustrated lust. An actual attachment to a human

would be bad. An upset in the balance that existed between elementals,

between the children of the sea and the children of the fire, would be

much worse.

“Demons are always disturbed,” she said. “What does that have to

do with us? With me? The sea folk are neutral in Hell’s war on

humankind. We always have been.”

“Hardly neutral,” Dylan said, “if you’re fucking one.”

The barb shot home. She flinched and then aimed her smile like a

knife.

“The way your mother did?”

“My mother
married
my father.”

Margred blinked, diverted. “Really? Why?”

Dylan’s lips peeled back. “Why do you think? He took her pelt.”

Ah. Selkies could not return to the sea without their sealskins. A

mortal man could keep a selkie wife . . . as long as he kept her sealskin

hidden. Because the children of such unions were rare—and usually

human—the marriages even worked out. Sometimes.

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“After I hit the Change, I found her sealskin,” Dylan explained. “She

took me back to sea with her.”

Margred tried and failed to imagine entering the land beneath the

wave for the first time at— How old must he have been? Twelve?

Thirteen? Almost grown, floundering in an unfamiliar body and an utterly

new world.

“That must have been . . . upsetting,” she ventured.

Dylan inclined his head. “Awkward, at least. Stick to your own

kind,” he advised. “Easier that way on everybody. ”

He was right.

Of course he was right.

She sympathized with his story. And yet . . . She glanced at his

throat. He did not wear the triskelion, the wardens’ mark, the sign of the

prince’s elite. But Dylan was still the prince’s protégé, as much the

prince’s creature as Conn’s hound. Had he issued his warning out of

genuine concern? Or to further some agenda of his own?

She left him, making her way down the tower steps to the sea caves

under the castle. Chinks of light pierced the thick stone walls. Margred’s

eyes adjusted to the gloom. The smell of the ocean rose from below like

the smoke from a human fire.

As she circled down the stairs, another selkie climbed up: Gwyneth

of Hiort. Her bare feet left damp splotches on the stone. A red robe

trimmed with sable wrapped her naked shoulders. The black fur

contrasted pleasingly with her milky skin and blond curls, but the choice

of garment was still somewhat shocking. The children of the sea

generally wore no pelts but their own.

Margred nodded politely. “Good hunting, Gwyneth.”

Gwyneth smiled, revealing sharp white teeth between soft pink lips.

“So it was. I went for fish and caught a fisherman—a trawler off Cape

Savage.”

“A handsome fisherman, I hope.”

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“Well enough. No staying power. Fortunately his mates supplied the

stamina he lacked.”

Margred raised her brows, amused. “You did the whole crew?”

Gwyneth shrugged, making the red robe slip on her shoulders. “It

was a small vessel. Besides, one man between your legs is the same as

another.”

Memory stirred.

My name
, the man had said, watching her with those sea green eyes.

It’s Caleb
.

I thought we could spend some time getting to know one another
.

Margred flushed. But she was no hypocrite, to rebuke Gwyneth for

saying what she had thought herself.

The other selkie’s gaze turned speculative. “I hear you’ve had good

hunting yourself. In . . . Maine, is it?”

Feeling burst in Margred’s chest—possessive, protective. “You hear

a lot at Caer Subai,” she said coolly. “And little worth listening to.”

Gwyneth ran her tongue over her teeth. “I only say, if you found

something tasty, you would not grudge a friend a bite.”

Margred’s eyes narrowed. Caleb was
hers
. “Unless I were still

hungry.”

Gwyneth’s smile broadened. “Now you intrigue me.”

“That was not my intention. Do not poach on my territory, little

sister. Or I will bite you myself.”

Gwyneth’s laughter followed Margred down the stairs.

But the joke, she thought, was on her.

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Somehow the human Caleb had snared her, tangled her up like an

unwary swimmer caught in a net. Why else would she decide to go back?

Fleetingly, she thought of Dylan’s mother, who had drowned.

Dylan’s warning rang in her ears: Because she ventured too close to

shore.

The sea boomed and echoed as Margred descended. Moisture

gleamed on the old stone walls. The way widened to a tunnel. The stairs

ended in a smooth slab of rock. Light penetrated from the cave mouth,

revealing a series of high-ceilinged chambers, one opening into another,

wider, deeper, each lined with chests and scattered with treasures.

She picked her way to a sea chest bound and riveted in iron set on a

ledge in the rock. Carvings of grain and apples chased around the rim.

Shimmying out of her robe, she threw back the lid.

Her pelt lay inside, silver brown and brindled in a pattern of fine

dark spots, uniquely hers. She scooped it up, cradling the fur skin against

her bare breasts with one arm as she bundled the velvet robe away.

A fresh breeze teased her hair and ruffled the pelt in her arms. She

raised her head to sniff the wind, shivering delicately.

Dropping the lid of the chest, she followed the air current to the

mouth of the cave. Light bounced from the sea and glittered on the rocks.

The sea cliffs towered at her back. Waves hissed and rushed at her pale,

thin, human feet. She stood with the water foaming around her ankles as

birds wheeled and cried over the ocean.

She raised the heavy pelt over her head. Its weight caressed her back

and settled over her shoulders. She felt it wrap to embrace her as the

Change took her, as her neck and forearms shortened, as her torso

thickened, as her thighs fused and shrank. Color and sound dimmed.

Brightness assaulted her expanding pupils. The cry of the birds sounded

thin and far away. And oh, the smells! They poured over her, a thick, rich

sea brew of kelp, cod, mussels, and plankton, carried to her on the breeze.

She inhaled deeply, lifting her sleek, bullet-shaped head to the wind.

Her whiskers quivered. She humped her body forward over the rocks,

propelling herself awkwardly with her stubby flippers and strong

abdominal muscles. A wave surged to greet her. She let it lift and roll her,

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let it seize and take her, let herself glide, surrounded and immersed in

pure sensation.

Sunlight struck through the darkening waves, through swaying

forests of kelp and rocks teeming with life, with barnacles and limpets,

seaweed and anemones. Here was grace. Here was freedom.

Here was home.

She plunged through the cool, dark water, leaving thought behind.

Her worries streamed up and away like a chain of silver bubbles.

* * * *

She could do this, first-year teacher Lucy Hunter assured herself at

the end-of-year assembly. She could survive another summer on the

island. She had before. Twenty-two of them, for God’s sake.

She smiled encouragement at Hannah Bly, fidgeting with the rest of

the island school chorus on a platform stage under the basketball goal.

Students and parents packed the community center. Folding chairs

squeaked on the wooden floor. The scent of coffee brewing in the lobby

overlaid the gym smells of dust and sweat.

The important thing was to keep busy. She could run every morning

and do lesson plans in the afternoon. The garden project she supervised

met twice a week. She volunteered at the church and the library. With a

little juggling, a little luck, she could stay out of the house and avoid the

beach entirely until school began again.

“Takes you back, doesn’t it?” her brother Caleb murmured low

behind her.

Startled, Lucy turned her head. She had glimpsed him before the

program started, surrounded by men eager to shake the hand of the

island’s returning war hero. But as soon as the children launched into

their closing song, she figured Caleb would slip out to the parking lot to

direct traffic.

She felt a glow of pleasure he would seek her out instead.

“It’s nice to have you here.”

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“For a change.”

Caleb had raised her since . . . well, since she was in diapers. After

their mother disappeared, taking their thirteen-year -old brother with her,

there hadn’t been anyone else to do the job. Certainly not their father,

who had responded to his wife’s desertion by retreating to his boat and

the bottle.

Caleb had left for college the year Lucy started third grade. But she

remembered him standing at the back of the room for her end-of-year

assemblies—her tall, kind, impossibly cool, remarkably tolerant older

brother.

“You came as often as you could.”

“Not often enough.” Caleb stared out at the rows of folding chairs

filled with parents and grandparents. The entire Hopkins family had

turned out to recognize son Matt’s graduation from the high school on the

mainland. Regina Barone, in black pencil jeans and a chic white blouse,

sat beside her mother, Antonia, in a purple velour track suit to see Nick

advance a grade. “I missed your college graduation. ”

“You were busy.”

He was in Iraq. Something else they never talked about.

Lucy tried again. “Anyway, Dad came.”

“Yeah. You told me in your e-mail. How’d that go?”

Not so well. Bart Hunter scowled through the ceremony and drank

through dinner, uncomfortable in a tie and ill at ease in the busy, trendy

restaurant she had picked out. Not even the clatter from the kitchen and

the laughter from other tables could cover the silence between them.

“Fine,” Lucy said. “I loved the flowers you sent.”

His eyes narrowed. Well, she hadn’t expected he’d be as easy to

divert as one of her five-year-olds.

“And the check,” she added hastily. “That was incredibly generous.”

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“I figured you could use it to move into an apartment someplace.

Augusta, maybe, or Portland.”

Lucy opened her mouth. Shut it.

“Why did you come back, Lucy?” Caleb asked.

It was a reasonable question. But then, her brother was always

reasonable.

Which was why she could never explain to him why she had chosen

to return. Back to the dark, cold house where they grew up, to the drafty

rooms haunted by the shell of their father, the ghosts of their mother and

brother.

Back to the island, where—for better and worse— everybody knew

their name and their business.

Back to the sea she feared and could not live away from.

She had tried. Once. Ran away, hitched a ride from Port Clyde as far

as Richmond and wound up on the dirty floor of a gas station restroom,

puking her guts into the toilet. The memory still made her sick to her

stomach.

Flu, the doctor on the island concluded, after Caleb had found her

and brought her home.

Stress, the physician’s assistant at the college infirmary told her

when she collapsed on a visit to Dartmouth, where she’d been offered a

scholarship.

Lucy didn’t know or understand the reasons. But through cautious

experimentation, she learned never to travel more than twenty miles from

the ocean. She attended state college in Machias, within walking distance

of the bay.

She licked her lips. “Why did you?”

Caleb raised one eyebrow. “I have a job here.”